Tales From The Green Motel

February 12, 1989|By MARGO HARAKAS, Staff Writer

Sue Kahn`s hands are calloused, her nails broken, her dyed-red hair pulled severely back. There`s a superficial toughness to her, imparted partly by her attire -- jeans, boots, cigarettes stuffed into a breast pocket. A protective facade, you soon decide, and you can`t help wondering at what point in her life it was constructed.

Sitting with her legs apart, looking straight ahead, the small, 30-year-old former farm worker speaks reluctantly. Had she been bigger and stronger, she tells you, ``I`d have killed him.``

She nods her head up and down, up and down, affirming the searing words.

Sue Kahn has been to The Green Motel, a euphemism used by farm workers for sex in the fields. Kahn says the term can carry a more ominous meaning -- coerced sex. And she is not alone.

You will find the women almost anywhere agriculture and field labor meet. Amid the sweet aroma of Central Florida`s orange blossoms, under the scorching sun in pickup trucks, in South Florida`s muck-rich vegetable and sugarcane fields, they are being economically forced into sexual submission.

``You`re afraid to speak out because you`re afraid to lose your job. And you don`t know there are laws to protect you,`` Kahn says.

No surveys, studies or statistics exist to show the extent of this exploitative practice, which ranges from rude comments and touching to rape. But those who work with farm workers maintain sexual harassment is commonplace. Even farm managers who deny that the problem exists on their own farms acknowledge its existence elsewhere. The only women who can be certain of not receiving unwanted sexual advances, say the field women, are those who work alongside boyfriends, husbands or other male relations.

``In order for a woman to get employment in agriculture, in many instances,`` says Randy Cecil, a Fort Pierce recruiter for the United Farm Workers of America, ``she has to make a deal men don`t have to make.``

Cecil has personally witnessed the sexual shakedown. He says women eager for work show up at a designated spot each morning hoping to be put on the bus. The women soon find out, Cecil says, ``They have to date the foreman in order to go to work.

``They`re told, `The crew`s full today. But if you come around to my house tonight, maybe there`ll be room for you tomorrow.```

Cecil raised the issue of sexual harassment at a recent union meeting in Central Florida, and found that ``all the women acknowledged it was going on, but no one would speak up.``

Sally Schmidt, a Rural Legal Services attorney in Belle Glade, filed at least eight sexual harassment complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1985 and 1987, the two years she handled such cases. She calls harassment of female farm workers ``incredibly prevalent.`` Although some women may escape the brunt of it, ``It happens,`` she says, ``on every farm.``

What is rare, according to Schmidt and others, is not the crime, but any willingness on the part of the victims to talk about it. Broach the subject and the women will cast their eyes aside and fall suddenly silent.

Still, occasionally, someone does step forward and in the process gives a glimpse of what others only privately admit is going on in the fields and the factories connected to them.

An Indiantown woman, who has worked the fields for 24 of her 35 years, tells of an orange grove supervisor who regularly would corner her to fondle her with his hands and lips. A Belle Glade woman tells how a sugar company foreman repeatedly grabbed her crotch and her breasts and tried to pressure her into sex ``in The Green Motel.`` A Lake Okeechobee vegetable worker relates how she was fired and put off the bus the day after complaining to a supervisor about a foreman inappropriately touching her.

Schmidt says the abuse ``is so prevalent, the women view it as something they have to put up with.``

In reality, little incentive exists for them to do otherwise.

``You don`t have a whole lot to gain personally from going to trial,`` says Rural Legal Services attorney Peter Helwig of Bartow. There`s no big payoff in these cases, no compensation for pain and suffering. The most a woman can recover is back wages. And doing that can be excruciating.

``I tell my clients, you`re the ones who are going to be on trial,`` Helwig says. ``What a lot of women hope and feel is that by standing up, they have stopped something. They`re saying, `Never again. Not to me. Not to my people or the people here.` And I think they`re right about that. It may not deter the managers or the men right away. But it gets the word out that somebody stood up and survived. And they got help.``

-- Sue Kahn was 21 in 1979, a divorcee with a 3-year-old son. She was driving a tractor in the Caulkins orange groves in Indiantown and had been on the job only a few days, she says, when her foreman began saying and doing things that would not be tolerated in most workplaces.